Ali Ibn Hossein, Silk Merchant of the Qeysarieh Bazaar

Location: The Grand Bazaar, Isfahan 

Date: 26th Ordibehesht, 999 (16th May, 1620) 

Current Keeper: Ali Ibn Hossein, Silk Merchant of the Qeysarieh Bazaar

I am writing this book by the light of an oil lamp in the back room of my shop, in the silk corridor of the Qeysarieh Bazaar in the city of Isfahan. If I breathe deeply enough, I can catch the saffron from the spice corridor two turns to the east. I can also faintly smell the rosewater from the perfumers near the second dome. The copper hammers have gone quiet. The coppersmiths must be finishing their last pieces before evening prayer.

Three months ago, a fire took the shop of old Mirza Taghi, the carpet merchant who sat four arches down from me. Forty years of records, letters, accounts, and personal writings burned in a single evening. His grandson came the next morning and stood in the ash, holding nothing. Everything Mirza Taghi had known, observed, and remembered through the reigns of two Shahs disappeared between dusk and dawn. When a

man dies, everything he carries in his head goes with him. And if he was wise enough to write it down, a single fire can take it all away. Kings build monuments. Scholars write books owned by many. Men like me, who weigh silk and count coins, leave behind nothing that anyone thinks worth preserving. I thought about this for many weeks after the fire. And after thinking for a few weeks, I started to write this letter in this book.

I have a copper box in the back of my shop where I keep coins and documents that matter. It has survived a flood and two small fires in the bazaar since my grandfather's time. I will place this book inside this box when I am finished writing this letter. And I will place with it a simple instruction for whoever opens the box after I am gone: read what is here, then add your own account of the world as you found it, and pass both the book and the box to someone you trust to do the same. I do not know who you will be. I do not know how many years will separate your life from mine. I only ask that you write honestly, and that you do not let the book end with you.

My name is Ali ibn Hossein. I sell silk. My father sold silk. His father sold silk in this same bazaar when the old square still served as the heart of the city before Shah Abbas, may God preserve him, built the new Maidan and made Isfahan the centre of the world. My wife, Zahra, thinks I am writing accounts. My eldest son, Reza, who will one day take my seat in the Qeysarieh if God and the Shah permit it, thinks I am recording debts. What I am doing is bolder in my opinion. I am writing down what I see, so that someone, someday, might know what it was like to live here.

I should tell you about this city, because I am not certain it will always be what it is now.

There is a saying we use very often: Isfahan nesf e jahan. It means Isfahan is half the world. When foreigners hear this, they laugh at it. They stop laughing when they enter the bazaar. Isfahan, as we sit here in the year 1620, holds nearly half a million souls within and around its walls. That places it alongside Constantinople, London, and the great cities of China. The Shah, may God grant him many years, rerouted the Silk Road through this city. He made it so that if you wanted to move goods between the East and the West, you had to pass through us.

The Grand Bazaar stretches over kilometres under a continuous vaulted brick ceiling, connecting the old city around the Friday Mosque to the enormous Naqsh e Jahan Square that the Shah completed only a few years ago. The square alone is so vast that the Shah holds polo matches on it. Every corridor of the bazaar belongs to a single trade. Walk north from the great square and you pass through the silk weavers, then the goldsmiths, then the carpet dealers, then the spice merchants with their sacks of saffron and cardamom and dried lime. The coppersmiths fill an entire arcade with the sound of hammering, so loud that the spice merchants next door say their headaches are the true cost of doing business in Isfahan. The Qeysarieh section, where I sit, opens directly onto the square. This is where the imperial trades live: wholesale silk, fine textiles, jewellers, silversmiths, and the state mint. To hold a shop in the Qeysarieh is to occupy the most prestigious trading address in the empire. My grandfather earned this position. I inherited it. I do not intend to lose it.

On any given morning in my corridor, I will trade with a Hindustani merchant who has come through Kandahar bringing raw cotton and indigo or haggle with an Ottoman buyer from Aleppo who arrives with coins and leaves with bales of Persian silk. He protests the quality every single time but still returns every single season. I have tea with an Armenian silk dealer from across the river, and watch an Englishman from the East India Company warehouse run his fingers over my fabrics as though he could judge quality by touch alone, which he cannot. The English and Dutch both keep permanent trading houses near the bazaar. They pack up and threaten to leave every few years, always over some disagreement about terms, and they always come back. The silk passes through Isfahan, and Isfahan answers to the Shah. That is all anyone needs to understand about power in this city. This flow of men and goods from every corner of the world is Shah's design. But the most remarkable part of his design stands across the river.

On the south bank of the river, there is a district called New Julfa. It is home to thousands of Armenian Christians, and it exists because of a decision the Shah made sixteen years ago that was equal parts ruthless and brilliant.

These Armenians once lived in the old trading town of Julfa, on the Aras River in the far northwest of the empire, right on the border with Ottoman lands. The merchants there were among the finest silk traders in the world, with networks reaching India, Venice, Amsterdam, and beyond. The problem was that Julfa sat exactly where our empire meets the Ottoman Empire, and the Shah had been fighting the Ottomans along that border for years. In 1604, facing the likelihood of losing Julfa to Ottoman forces, Shah Abbas made a ruthless choice: rather than let Julfa fall into Ottoman hands, he would strip it of everything worth having. The Ottomans would inherit nothing but empty towns and ash. He ordered the entire Armenian population be removed and marched south to Isfahan. Nearly three hundred thousand people walked across the mountains through winter. Their towns were emptied behind them. What could not be moved was destroyed. Many did not survive the journey. Families who had traded from the same shopfronts for generations arrived in Isfahan carrying whatever they could hold.

But Shah had a plan for them. He understood that these were people who knew how to move silk across continents, and because they were Christian, they could deal with European merchants far more naturally than we could. So he built them a district across the river, named it New Julfa after the home they had lost, granted them freedom of worship, let them choose their own leaders, and eventually gave them a monopoly on the silk trade with India. Their suffering on the road was brutal. But the prosperity that followed made it worth their while. The Shah got what he wanted: a ruined border the Ottomans could not use, and a community of master traders generating wealth inside his capital.

I have known Arakel, an Armenian dealer in raw silk, for eleven years. He lives across the river in Julfa, in a stone house with a courtyard garden that would make half the Muslim merchants in the Qeysarieh quietly envious. They have built a cathedral in the quarter called the Vank. Every wall inside is covered with paintings of their Christian stories, rendered in colours so vivid that the only comparison I can make is to the miniatures produced by the Shah's own royal painters. Our royal painters work on pages no larger than a man's hand. They use brushes so fine they are made from just a few hairs of a kitten's neck. With these, they paint entire gardens, lovers, hunting scenes, and battles in detail so intricate that you have to bring the page close to your eyes to believe what you are seeing.

The Isfahan school of painting is producing work right now that I believe will be studied for centuries. The colours they use, lapis and gold leaf and vermilion, glow on the page like something else. When I once stood in the Vank Cathedral, I saw the Armenians doing something of the same order on walls and ceilings and domed surfaces. Angels in gold leaf and scenes of suffering rendered with such beauty that you forget you are looking at pain. Two traditions, side by side across a river, each making the world more beautiful in its own language. I asked Arakel once whether he ever felt like a stranger here. He laughed and said: "Ali, I was a stranger when they marched my family across the mountains with everything we owned on our backs. Now I am a man whose house the Shah himself has visited. Strangeness wears off when money arrives." That is how Armenians talk. Laughter aimed at the wound so the wound does not win. His grandfather was among those who walked. Arakel does not talk about the walk. He only talks about what came after.

I should say that the Shah's generosity toward the Armenians is deep, but it has its edges. This year, 1620, the Shah attended one of their religious ceremonies in New Julfa, which delighted the Armenian community and displeased many of the Muslim clerics. But I have also heard accounts of Armenian communities at the far edges of the empire being pressured to convert, and of incentives offered to those who accept Islam willingly. The Jews and Zoroastrians of Isfahan live under heavier restrictions and do not enjoy what the Armenians enjoy. The Shah's tolerance follows the direction of his interests. I need to add that I do not say this to condemn him. I say it because this book is meant to hold the truth of things, and the truth of things is rarely one colour.

There is something else you must understand about this city, and about every city in this empire. It is the one thing that defines us more than trade, more than language, more than the Shah himself.

We are Shias. This single fact separates us from nearly every power that surrounds us.

A hundred and nineteen years ago, when the Safavid dynasty came to power, they declared that this empire would follow the Shia path of Islam. Most people in these lands had been Sunni until then, following the same tradition as the Ottoman Empire to our west and the Mughal Empire to our east. The Safavids brought scholars from Lebanon and Bahrain to teach a population that barely knew the difference. Within two or three generations, the country had changed entirely. Today, being Shia is so deeply a part of who we are that most Persians cannot imagine having ever been anything else.

Let me tell you what we believe. When the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, died in 632, he left no written instructions naming a successor. For most Muslims, those who would come to be called Sunni, leadership passed through election and consensus, to the companions closest to the Prophet. They argued that this was practical. The community would have chosen.

We believed otherwise. We believed leadership was never the community's to choose. God had already chosen. The Prophet's rightful heir was his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, a man who had grown up in the Prophet's own household, who had known him as no elected caliph could. After Ali, leadership passed through his sons, and their sons after them. We call these men the Twelve Imams, political rulers and spiritual guides. The only ones with the authority and the inner knowledge to lead the faithful rightly. The twelfth of these Imams did not die. He disappeared from the world as a young child, in the year 874, passing into a state we call occultation. Hidden from human sight, but present, waiting. He will return at the end of days to fill the earth with justice, as it is now filled with oppression.

This is the axis on which our entire world turns. The disagreement with the Sunni tradition is over a thousand years old, and it has never been merely religious. It has drawn every border in this part of the world, ignited every war, and determined every alliance.

There is one more thing you need to know. It happened in the year 680, on a plain in what is now Iraq.

Hussein, grandson of the Prophet, was slaughtered with his family and companions at Karbala by the armies of the Umayyad caliph Yazid in the year 680. He knew he would die. He went anyway, because he believed that bending to tyranny was a greater sin than death. Every year, during the months of Muharram and Ashura, our city transforms. The bazaar empties. Processions fill the streets. Men beat their chests in grief. Passion plays retell the story of Karbala, and grown men weep openly for a man who died nearly a thousand years ago. My son Reza, who is sixteen and embarrassed by most things, weeps without shame during Ashura. So do I. So does every man I know. I have seen foreign visitors stand at the edges of these processions, unable to understand why an entire city would shut down to mourn an ancient death. The answer is that for us, Hussein's sacrifice lives in the present tense. It teaches that standing against injustice, even when you know you will be destroyed, is the highest act of faith. I do not know what the future holds for Iran, but I am certain of this: whenever the people of this land rise against power, they will carry Hussein in their hearts. Remember his name.

By choosing Shia Islam, the Safavids did something that went beyond theology. They gave Iran a soul that belonged to no one else. The Ottomans could not claim it. The Mughals could not absorb it. A shared faith unified our many peoples, our Persians and Turks and Kurds and Arabs and Baluch, under a single spiritual identity. A border drawn in belief is stronger than any border drawn in stone. We carry this faith in our daily speech, too, though we do not always notice it.

There is another thing about this city that will confuse you if I do not explain it now. When a customer enters my shop and asks the price of something, I do not simply tell him. I wave my hand and say the silk is nothing special, that he deserves better. He insists. I name a price. He protests. I lower it and say I would rather lose money than lose his respect. None of this is true, and both of us know it, but we do it every time. We call this taarof. It governs everything in Persian life. A host will keep offering food long after the guest is full. The guest will keep refusing until the host insists enough times that accepting becomes the polite thing to do. Both sides are trying to out-give the other. This is how Persians show that the person in front of them matters more than whatever is being offered or sold. I have never met anyone in this city who could tell you where taarof ends and genuine feeling begins. I am not sure there is a line between the two.

Next to our faith and taarof, equally important, sits Persian Poetry. Every man and woman in this city, whether they can read or not, carries verses in their memory. The greatest of all our poets is Hafez of Shiraz, who died more than two hundred years before I was born and whose words are more alive in Isfahan today than the words of any living man. His collected poems, the Divan, sit in nearly every home. We read him, yes, but more than that, we live by him. When a family gathers for Yalda Night, the longest night of the year, someone opens the Divan to a random page and reads the poem aloud. Whatever it says is taken as a message, a kind of fortune, a whisper from across the centuries that somehow addresses whatever question was weighing on the heart of the person who opened the book. We call this fal e Hafez. I have seen merchants use it before deciding on a trade. I have seen mothers use it when choosing a suitor for their daughter. I have seen old men open it alone in the back of the bazaar at closing time, read a single verse, close the book, and nod as though they had received an answer to something they had never spoken aloud. I will write one of his verses here, because I want whoever reads this book to know what kind of words we lived inside:

From the fragrance of your tresses, what peace can I find? From each strand, a thousand hearts hang in anguish.

Every line of Hafez holds two meanings at once: the earthly beloved and the divine beloved, the human ache and the sacred one. A merchant quotes Hafez over tea to show that he is cultured. A lover whispers Hafez to show that his suffering is noble. A cleric quotes Hafez in a sermon and bends the meaning toward God. The same words serve all of them, and Hafez wrote them so that no one could ever prove which meaning he intended.

Now let me tell you, finally, about the Shah himself. I have circled around him throughout this entry, the way all of us in Isfahan circle around him in life, aware of his presence in everything but careful about how directly we look.

Shah Abbas has ruled for thirty two years. In that time, he has rebuilt this city into something the world has never seen. The Naqsh e Jahan Square, with the Shah Mosque at its southern end and the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque on its eastern face, is decorated in beautiful polychrome tiles that visitors from Europe have written letters home calling Isfahan a city made of jewels. The Chahar Bagh avenue, lined with gardens and palaces and flowing water channels, runs from the city centre to the river. The bridges over the Zayandeh Rud are works of architecture. I have stood on the Si o Seh Pol, the bridge of thirty three arches, at dusk, and watched the water reflect the arches in such perfect symmetry that the bridge seemed to float between two skies.

The Shah built all of this. But he has also blinded two of his own sons and killed a third, because he feared they would conspire against him. He reformed the army, broke the power of the tribal warlords who had held his predecessors hostage, and created a centralized state that answers to him alone. He invited European military advisors to train his soldiers, defeated the Ottomans in battle after battle, and recaptured territories his grandfather had lost. He is, by any honest measure, the greatest king Iran has had in centuries, and also one of the most frightening men alive.

I describe all this because this book will travel through years, and whoever reads it should understand what kind of soil it was planted in. Isfahan in 1620 is a city of silk and saffron, of starlight falling through domed ceilings, of the muezzin's voice at dawn and Hafez whispering over tea at dusk. It is also a city that belongs, ultimately, to one man, and that man is capable of breathtaking beauty and breathtaking cruelty in the same afternoon. We live in his vision. We prosper by his design. And every merchant in this bazaar knows that everything we have exists because the Shah permits it.

So this is what I ask of whoever finds this book after I am gone:

Write what you have witnessed. Add what you know. Describe the time you live in with honest eyes. Do not flatter the powerful. Do not erase the small. And when you have written your entry, pass this book forward to someone you believe will honour the same duty.

Do not let it sit idle. Do not let it burn.

I, Ali ibn Hossein, silk merchant of Isfahan, son of Hossein, grandson of Taghi, have set down this first entry in the year 1620, the year 1029 by our own calendar, in the city we call half the world, under the reign of Shah Abbas, whom God may judge more mercifully than history will.

The ink is drying. The lamp is low. The muezzin will call soon.